ISSUE 31, RICE, Part 3: Carolina Gold
What we know in 2021 that we did not know in 2004 when the rice was revived
Carolina Gold Rice
What we Know in 2021 that we did Not Know when its Revival Began
1. That Carolina Gold was a name adopted for the rice variety at about the time it ceased being grown commercially in the Lowcountry in 1918. During the heyday of its cultivation it was known as “Gold Seed Rice.”
2. That Carolina Gold was not the first rice planted in the Carolina colony at the end of the 17th century—that was Madagascar White. Carolina Gold only appeared in the 1785-86 growing seasons after the Revolution had disrupted seed production for Madagascar Gold.
3. That Hezekiah Mayham of Pineville Plantation in Berkeley County is probably the first cultivator of the variety. We do not know whence he secured the seed. He had many transatlantic contacts.
4. That Carolina Gold is genetically a subtropical japonica rice. Its original place of nativity was somewhere in South Asia, perhaps Indonesia. But like many important early grain varieties it was cultivated in numbers of places across the globe. Dr. Anna McClung did a thorough genetic mapping of Carolina Gold—since it is one of the oldest forms of subtropical japonica in the world. Its genome is a reference for many related rice varieties and is one of the most important resources for genetic rice analysis.
5. That besides Carolina Gold there were two other commercial forms of the rice: Carolina white—the same rice but with a light tan rather than a gold husk. This variety survives in South America. They there is Long Gold, a longer mutation that enjoyed immense international repute from 1845-1861. It went extinct during the Civil War. Anna McClung renovated the long form of Carolina Gold in her “Santee Gold” release of 2021.
6. By 1800 Carolina planters had determined that Carolina Gold would be the crop rise of the state, and various attempts to diversity plantings (Jefferson’s donation of 90+ varieties of Philippine Rice for instance) were pointedly rejected.
7. That the cheap Honduran White Rice that eventually supplanted Carolina Gold in the marketplace is a variety that is relatively closely related to Carolina Gold.
8. That tons of Carolina Gold Rice seed were shipped to India in the 1870s by the British Government with the intention of upgrading the qualities of Native landraces there. As one might suspect, the project had limited success.
9. That the tendency for Carolina Gold Rice grains to shatter during milling was the primary impetus behind milling rice flour in the 1850s. When an international demand for rice flour ignited, the millers’ anxieties about losing revenue on the sale of middlings (broken rice) evaporated.
10. That raw milled rice long soaked in water and pounded with granulated sugar was a sacred holiday dish of some Gullah-Geechee settlements along the rice coast.
11. That without careful seed management some strains of Carolina Gold will out-mutate to a red weedy ancestor.
12. That Carolina Gold can be dry cultured in garden style plantings using the SRI planting protocols, but this upland style cultivation is not as productive as water cultivation of Carolina Gold or dry cultivation of historic upland varieties.
13. That salt tolerance is the trait most needful going forward in cultivating this historic variety.